Stop hoping that Pluto will regain its former designation as a planet. It isn’t going to happen. But the good news is, Pluto is something much cooler than a mere planet. It’s the largest dwarf planet we know, and one half of the first binary planet system. Pluto didn’t get demoted, it got promoted. »7/23/15 4:40pm 7/23/15 4:40pm

The Age of Exploration brought Europeans riches, a broader view of the world, and a hell of a lot of new plants and animals to describe. That was heaven for Carl Linnaeus, a young Swedish doctor with a passion for plants. »6/26/15 9:28am 6/26/15 9:28am

Over the past decade, you may have noticed more and more articles referring to "hominins" rather than "hominids." Just why are Homo sapiens and her ancestors now called hominins? The answer isn't just semantic — it has to do with a revolution in the way evolutionary biologists perceive humans' place in the tree of… »3/12/12 3:53pm 3/12/12 3:53pm

Botanists estimate there are 70,000 species of flowering plant still waiting to be identified. They also suspect that about half of those were already found up to 200 years ago, and nobody has gotten around to identifying them yet. »12/09/10 10:24am 12/09/10 10:24am